Awakened

Someone told me that “getting woked” is a new phrase that means getting enlightened about our current social conditions—or at least to one popular version of them.

Helen Keller got “woked” to social conditions too and became an activist for change.  But this was not the awakening that meant the most to her.  Earlier, she had been awakened into a new dimension of existence, by language itself.

Born in 1880, Helen was a toddler when she came down with a fever that would not go away.  Finally it did, but left her blind and deaf.  She grew up normal in all other respects, running around her parents’ country home, doing everything toddlers and children do.

Everything, that is, except for learning to talk or listen, and thus be able to know a language, and thus be able to think.  By the age of seven she was becoming so wild and unpredictable—and a danger to herself and others—that her parents were on the brink of placing her in a sanatorium.  Her mother implored her father to attempt one last resort.

They hired a teacher, Annie Sullivan, to try to teach Helen tactile sign language and oversee her.

Keller and Sullivan

Annie would follow Helen around the house and the farm yard and whenever Helen touched something Annie would take her hand and trace the letters for it in Annie’s palm.

But this activity meant nothing to Helen.  How could it?  She instead reacted against Annie for slowing down her impulses and wanderings.

Then came a day Helen never forgot—March 5, 1887—she was with Annie at the water pump, feeling the cool water splash onto her hand.  Annie, as often before, was tracing the symbols for “water” into Helen’s other hand.

But this time something happened.  Helen connected the specific pressures and shapes Annie pushed in her palm with what she was feeling coming out of the spigot.

What came next changed Helen’s life forever.  It is one of the most significant events in history.  It is also something that shines a light on the mysterious depths of what it means to be …you, a human being, rather than something like my black Pit Bull–Labrador mix sleeping on the couch in the next room.

Next:  The mystery of language revealed.